Advercation = Advertising + Education

This week 275 authors submitted their individual chapters for Why Don’t They Get It, a follow up to The Age of Conversation. (All proceeds go to Variety, The Children’s Charity.)

Last year I wrote a chapter on how brand marketers should approach using social media for marketing purposes.

Since that time, I launched my own agency, iStrategyLabs, which focuses on providing clients with interactive strategy (the “iStrategy part”) and digital/physical productions (the “Labs” part).

So, in keeping with iStrategyLabs focus, I contributed a chapter called “Four Principles for Fusing Experiential Marketing and Social Media”. It is my firm belief that interactive channels are rapidly burning out. Think about it this way: how many websites can you visit? How many banners can you click? How many RSS feeds can you follow? Here is a small piece of one of the principles:

The Creation Principle: Experiential marketing is employed by brands to drive deep engagement with an audience in a physical place. However, event producers must think beyond how the offline audience will interact with the brand so that they can build experiences for the online audience as well.

• Structure your talent agreements so the audience is allowed to capture content.
• Allow all cameras onsite. Video and photos shot by your audience will be uploaded to social networks and used in blog posts.

In this increasingly cluttered digital environment marketers need to marry the online and offline worlds to have authentic and lasting conversations with their audiences - this is how marketing is done today. It’s not the future. It’s imperative to market this way NOW.

The book is currently being editing and will be published soon. When it is released I hope you will pick up a copy because, a) my chapter may provide some value to you, b) if not, one of the other 274 could and c) in the worst case you will have contributed to a good cause as all profits are donated.

I look forward to reading the chapters of my fellow authors, especially those by friends:

C.C. Chapman, Ernie Mosteller, Joe Talbott, Jonathan Trenn, Laura Fitton, and Sam Huleatt

You can find out more about the other wonderful authors after the break: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve recently contributed to what may be a first-of-its-kind collaboration via the internet - more than 100 thinkers have joined together online to write The Age of Conversation, a book focused on social media.

After months of preparation, The Age of Conversation was published today and is available for purchase (All proceeds from sales of the book will be donated to Variety, the Children’s Charity).

The book can be purchased here:

Here’s are some articles about the book:

Coverage of the book in Advertising Age

An article in Social Computing Magazine